<p>At least the school tells students what is required. Many pre-nursing programs do not clearly tell students that minimum transfer requirements into the full nursing major are far below what it actually takes to get in.
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/1619830/don-t-make-the-mistakes-we-made-s-not-accepted-into-b-school-at-top-10?#”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/1619830/don-t-make-the-mistakes-we-made-s-not-accepted-into-b-school-at-top-10?#</a>
Planning to transfer in to a highly sought after major at a large public university is often a risky proposition. </p>
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<p>True, many economics majors are “soft” regarding math. But don’t even the “soft” ones typically include an econometrics course that needs to use more math and statistics than general business major courses?</p>
<p>Was his math prep adequate for the class he took? Did he know he was doing C level work all semester, or was this just a bad grade on the final after a solid semester?</p>
<p>Can he major in econ in Arts and Sciences and also take the classes he’s interested in to cover off the accounting/finance stuff even if he’s not in the school of business? </p>
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Many pre-nursing programs do not clearly tell students that minimum transfer requirements into the full nursing major are far below what it actually takes to get in.
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<p>This is very true. When I’ve seen BSN programs indicate a minimum GPA that is far below what the avg accepted student has, I’ve just guessed that the minimum is to give them wiggle room for program diversity.</p>
<p>That makes me want to ask…how diverse is the B-school at IU? </p>
<p>Or the minimum is just a hard minimum, but the actual admission standard depends on how many students apply each year. This is similar to frosh admission to California State Universities, where minimum eligibility can be satisfied by a 2.5 HS GPA and a 900 SAT CR+M for frosh, or a 2.0 college GPA for junior transfers, but most campuses and majors have higher standards due to the number of students applying relative to the space available.</p>
<p>Not sure why OP’s son feel UG business is so much more prestigious than a BA in econ/math/physics/philosophy…Unless it is a top notch business school, a lot people tend to think it is an easy degree. My kid double majored in math/econ, she took few courses at her uni’s business school, and she found them to be a lot easier than similar courses offered at her A&S school. When we look at an applicant’s resume, we would expect higher GPA from a business school than from other majors.</p>
<p>Graduates from Kelley may have better job prospects than graduates from A&S, but it may not necessary be the case from other business schools. With a C in calculus, he is probably going to have a hard time to transfer to AEM or to Wharton. If I were him, I would stay at where he is, take few courses at the business school to show he has aptitude to his future employers. My kid took finance courses to do just that, and she didn’t have any problem in getting a job in finance after graduation.</p>
<p>Employers say stuff all the time but when it comes to actual hiring they got to certain good business schools for most of their people for entry level jobs. Some will also consider econ majors. This for Fortune 500 type companies–not Wall Street and a few top consulting firms where old school connections still rule. Burt they will also work you like a rented mule and then fire half of the class after a few years.</p>
<p>@bernie12 Why would you say that undergraduate education in business is overrated? Is a graduate-level business education equally overrated?</p>
<p>@Catria: I just believe that you can gain as much ground by majoring in say, math or CS, or a rigorous economics program. Also, I am commenting on the academics. I feel that many “less prestigious” academic tracks that tie nicely into working for a firm or starting a business, are academically more rigorous and require greater cognitive skills to complete the curriculum. A lot of research has been done about the lack of rigor in many undergraduate business programs, especially with respect to other disciplines within a college or university. Generally, decent MBA programs are rigorous and do help to build key skills that one would need in the business world I suppose. However, the networking opportunities allotted to students in good BBA programs are excellent. In addition, many BBA programs have a richer extracurricular environment that focuses on professional development and networking. </p>
<p>A lot of undergrad business programs take two weeks worth of content (in say, buyer behavior, or organizational development) and stretch it out into a semester. 30 pages of reading a week, two 8 page papers and a multiple choice test. That’s why they have a reputation for “fluff”- not that the content isn’t the same as the content taught at the graduate level, just that the requirements are relatively weak. A decent college will have a sequence in statistics which is significantly harder and more rigorous than the required statistics course in the undergrad business program. Some undergrad business programs will have a one semester econ course which combines the traditional one semester of micro, one semester of macro taught in most econ departments… and there will be no math prerequisite. (basically, “econ lite”). And since the students won’t have actual “business” experience, discussion based problem-solving (for example, a real life supply chain/logistics issue) is going to be a re-hash of what’s in the textbook.</p>
<p>I’ve worked for employers who have a very short list (as in about four) colleges where an undergrad business degree is perceived as reasonably comparable to econ, math, political science, when it comes to content. My current employer would much rather hire a BA in English Lit who has taken a two semester statistics sequence, or has taken a few CS courses, than hire a BA or BS in “business” (Wharton being an exception.) There are business schools where the median SAT scores are much lower than those of the Philosophy or History department (both math and verbal.) What does that tell you about the strength of the students in those classes?</p>
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<p>In general, business as a major gets more popular at less selective schools. Perhaps that is the reason why there is often a level of school-prestige-elitism in hiring of business majors, where either highly selective schools, or highly selective business majors within selective schools, are preferred.</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus: I think at selective schools, the business majors are on par or are at a slightly lower caliber than the rest of the student body. Usually, the highest at schools that have it, is engineering. And even at selective schools, many of the b-school courses and pre-reqs are “fluffy”.Our business economics class is the “econ lite” course you describe except that the particular instructor writes challenging exams (like 3 hours long and will only be short answer and involve reading articles during it). It’s clearly there to weed some students out using the exam difficulty and the business school curve (1/2 of the students essentially have to get below B+ which will hurt their chances of admission). Also, it seems to be doing the screening that the calculus classes fail to do (though wierdly enough, at Emory where the intro. calc. classes are super duper easy, it’s often the pre-business students who are struggling. I guess because many of them are “noobs” to calculus whereas everyone else is usually a pre-med who forfeited their AP credit to get the easy A. Some instructors run median grades in calc. 1 upwards to the 90s!). I was also recently in shock to find out that the financial accounting class that every pre-bus/b-school student complains about is a multiple choice test class (needless to say, my friends from the college who are in the class say it isn’t that hard lol). Some classes are at a very good level, I guess… They are stressful more so than anything else because of the grading curve. It really makes no sense to have a grading curve for easy courses. They should simply make it harder in my opinion. There seems to be too much effort by UG business programs to use grading in order to “appear” rigorous. </p>
<p>It’s not just elitism- it’s content and rigor. Give me a history major who has written a senior thesis comparing China and Brazil’s economy and political structure in the 1960’s-1980’s (assuming he or she used primary sources, crunched the data, came to logical conclusions) over a plain vanilla “international business major” from random ABC college any day. I have interviewed undergrad business majors who have never (that is- zero times) used a primary source for a paper. I have interviewed undergrad business majors who do not know the difference between quantitative and qualitative research. (hint- not everything can be decided by focus groups!) I have interviewed undergrad business majors who can plug numbers into a spreadsheet and come up with the correct answer, but who have never actually questioned why certain variables are important- or not- or secondary- to others.</p>
<p>So I don’t think it’s school-prestige-elitism at play. The undergrad B schools don’t always require a high bar for analytical thinking (even to pass courses in analytically based disciplines) and employers therefore are leery.</p>
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<p>I would not disagree in general, but there are schools where the business major is more popular than its capacity and imposes an additional selective admission process beyond just getting into the school (this applies to the school that the student in this thread is at). In such cases, the additional selective admission process to get into the business major screens out the lower ability business major aspirants, raising the average of business majors.</p>
<p>Of course, whether the business major curriculum at such schools is rigorous in terms of what blossom is referring to is another matter entirely. There was an article at an MIT publication showing the results of a survey of students’ workload. The management (business) major (course 15) was at the low end of student workload. <a href=“http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N59/pressure/breakdown/course/index.htm”>http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N59/pressure/breakdown/course/index.htm</a></p>
<p>But the most elitist employers are probably looking more at getting candidates who have been pre-selected as “elite” by their colleges’ (or majors’) admission processes, rather than whether they have been taking the most rigorous courses and curricula in college.</p>
<p>@blossom: That’s what a lot of the research says about undergraduate business courses and programs in general. Luckily at Emory, and many better business schools like it there are some experiential courses primarily for juniors and seniors. However, overall, I’m glad that our BBAs spend 2 years in the college completing some GERs (though unfortunately, many overlap w/BBA pre-reqs. At least they have to do a freshman seminar, Continued Writing Requirements, and that sort of thing). Also, I suppose students at more selective schools are more likely to just develop analytical skills through internships and extra curricular endeavors (and there are more double majors than normal among a more driven student body: As in, one in the b-school and one outside of it). They fare well in interviews for many firms that do “case based” interviews for example. So this is an example where the brightness of the students and resources of the institution can easily mask the weaknesses of the curriculum they completed. For less “bright” students, I imagine it’s easier to expose them. </p>
<p>Look at our business school admissions entrance page: <a href=“http://goizueta.emory.edu/degree/undergraduate/admissions/index.html”>http://goizueta.emory.edu/degree/undergraduate/admissions/index.html</a></p>
<p>Seriously, it’s encouraging students to take risks and be involved, but then requires a soft set of pre-requisites and then the admissions numbers basically say that you need around a 3.6. That’s not conducive to taking risks. It basically says that the b-school pre-reqs taken by most are where most students received a B grade (because they are curved so that no more than 35% get A grades) and that the other courses must have been ones where they received some sort of A. If they didn’t choose courses where an A was expected, then many (among the 80% admitted) would not meet the 3.6 threshold. Trust me, there is no risk taking going on among pre-BBA’s. It’s all talk, just like the talk of the rigor in the b-school curriculum. However, I’ll give them this. They require students to take a minimum of 15 hours which is equivalent to 5 classes. So I suppose having more classes than some college students may result in it kind of “feeling” the same though each individual course is not likely to be as demanding as the average course taken by a student in the college. </p>
<p>The pre-reqs can be all fulfilled with AP credit easily: <a href=“Matriculation | Undergraduate Business Degree (BBA) | Emory University Goizueta Business School”>http://goizueta.emory.edu/degree/undergraduate/admissions/academic_requirements.html</a></p>
<p>I have to wonder if those with the credits “pre-med it” and just forfeit the credits and retake them at Emory (except maybe Econ. Stats and English) to ensure the GPA. Again, this is all the epitome of taking the risks described… </p>
<p>Getting back to the OP’s situation - Kelley has been rather inflexible for a number of years. The IU forum has several threads detailing the issue of getting into Kelley as a non-direct admit, including some where even kids who seemed to meet the requirements didn’t get in. </p>
<p>It is not just Kelley. My DS is a senior at Farmer B-school at Miami OH, which has a huge number of cross-applications with Kelley. It has just implemented a similar but less draconian rule. Due to the growth of Farmer, DS told me that applicants to the B-school now need a 3.3 GPA instead of a 3.0 for admission. With this requirement a C might be barely OK, if you have enough A’s to offset it. </p>
<p>These programs are desired because they are the ticket to interview with the Big 4 accounting firms, the major banks and Fortune 500 companies that recruit on campus. The B schools get these firms/companies to come and then tend to restrict the interviews to B school students. Given the economy, everyone wants to able to interview… </p>
<p>Wow, that’s how those schools do it? Do they severely restrict admissions or do the majority of applicants gain admission? The way this looks, I actually feel really bad for the OP’s son. He sort of drew the short end of the stick by taking Calc. when he didn’t need to. And when I think about it, I suppose the security is worth going to the b-school (even if you don’t really want it). I suppose I would try to transfer in order to see if I could be admitted to another business school (though a C may make it a little harder to even transfer). Also, I would check the policy for the recruitment and see if the companies restrict themselves to b-school students. Perhaps the OP’s son may have access as an economics major (I feel if they work hard, they’ll recover and make a solid performance in econ) or something else. And again, at large schools with both business and say, engineering, many companies will be recruiting there. If the OP’s son just gained some meaningful computational skills (CS coursework) and perhaps redeem themselves in math as an econ. major, I feel as if they will end up competitive for positions at decent paying firms outside of the ones business school students typically aim for. </p>
<p>I think the trick is to go direct admit. Because of the popularity of the business programs there is an emphasis on direct admits and tough standards to transfer in. You don’t have to be Einstein to get in at either school as a direct admit, but woe to the kid who is undecided and isn’t a top student freshman year. </p>
<p>FYI - At Kelley a weighted HS GPA of 3.7 and say a 30+ ACT gets you a direct admit. At Farmer its a holistic direct admit process. The 2013 stats are a middle 50% 3.62 - 4.08 GPA and a 27-31 ACT. My DS will be going to Notre Dame for his Masters in Accounting and has heard through the grapevine that ND now wants students to indicate if they plan to enroll at Mendoza. Historically any ND student can enter the B-school as a sophomore. Mendoza also does not accept ANY transfers from other schools!</p>
<p>Another example:</p>
<p>Berkeley (Haas) undergraduate business is only enterable at the junior level. This means that entering frosh need to take the prerequisites and then apply, typically in their second year. The admissions process is competitive and holistic, rather than just a pre-announced GPA threshold like some other limited-access majors. Junior transfer applications for the business major from students at other schools are also accepted.</p>
<p>Even with limited access through competitive admissions, business is one of the largest majors on the Berkeley campus.</p>
<p>Oh Okay, I actually thought Emory’s was basically the only 2 year program. So y’alls is exactly the same as ours. </p>